"Life does not add to the stock of any human form of energy, nor does death affect the sum of energy in any known way."[[10]]
"Life can generate no trace of energy, it can only guide its transmutations."[[11]]
"My contention then is—and in this contention I am practically speaking for my brother physicists—that whereas life or mind can neither generate energy nor directly exert force, yet it can cause matter to exercise force on matter, and so can exercise guidance and control; it can so prepare any scene of activity, by arranging the position of existing material, and timing the liberation of existing energy, as to produce results concordant with an idea or scheme or intention; it can, in short, 'aim' and 'fire.'"[[12]]
"It is impossible to explain all this fully by the laws of mechanics alone."[[13]]
"On a stagnant and inactive world life would be powerless: it could only make dry bones stir in such a world if it were itself a form of energy. It is only potent where inorganic energy is mechanically 'available'—to use Lord Kelvin's term—that is to say, is either potentially or actually in process of transfer and transformation. In other words, life can generate no trace of energy, it can only guide its transformation."[[14]]
"Life possesses the power of vitalising the complex material aggregates which exist on this planet, and of utilising their energies for a time to display itself amid terrestrial surroundings; and then it seems to disappear or evaporate whence it came."[[15]]
To these voices from Germany or England we can add that of M. Bergson from France. In many respects, as he says, he is at one with Sir Oliver Lodge. If he goes beyond him, it is mainly in these ways. He emphasises the element of Freedom, the power of choice as shewn by every living thing. It appears, he says, "from the top to the bottom of the animal scale," "although the lower we go, the more vaguely it is seen." "In very truth, I believe no living organism is absolutely without the faculty of performing actions and moving spontaneously; for we see that even in the vegetable world, where the organism is for the most part fixed to the ground, the faculty of motion is asleep rather than absent altogether. Sometimes it wakes up, just when it is likely to be useful."
And this is not all. What is specially characteristic of M. Bergson is the insistence that this power of choice is an evidence of Consciousness. "Life," he declares, "is nothing but consciousness using matter for its purposes." "There is behind life an impulse, an immense impulse to climb higher and higher, to run greater and greater risks in order to arrive at greater and greater efficiency." "Obviously there is a vital impulse."[[16]]
"Life appears in its entirety as an immense wave which, starting from a centre, speeds outwards, and which on almost the whole of its circumference is stopped"—that is, as he explains, by matter—"and converted into oscillation; at one point the obstacle has been forced, the impulsion has poured freely. It is this freedom that the human form registers. Everywhere but in man consciousness has had to come to a stand; in man alone it has kept on its way. Man continues the vital movement indefinitely, although he does not draw along with him all that life carries in itself. On other lines of evolution there have travelled other tendencies which life implied"—the reference is more especially to powers of instinct as distinguished from those of intelligence—"and of which, since everything interpenetrates, man has doubtless kept something, but of which he has kept only a little."[[17]]
Perhaps the most astonishing thing about M. Bergson's philosophy is his unreadiness to allow that the consciousness, which he says is everywhere at work, has any deliberate purpose in its working. Mr. Balfour has called attention to the unsatisfactoriness of what he described as "too hesitating and uncertain a treatment."[[18]]